QualOSS: Interviewing Companies

This project started around four years ago. I just started in LibreSoft and this was my first project in terms of acquiring experience and working in an international environment. This was in somehow my starting point in real software engineering field, working with companies and academic partners and having real responsibilities.

And here we go: QualOSS basically started as this kind of project start: looking around and checking what could be useful. In fact, one of the main purposes of the project was to have a real industrial application, what implies start talking to companies.

Several companies were interviewed by the QualOSS consortium. Between two or three per partner and main questions were derived from the current state of the art during those days in software quality, but also trying to deal with the idea of open source in all the skeleton.

From my personal point of view, the main goal that we achieved with this approach was to realise that there were kind of three prototype of company:

• First of all: Those companies which do not care open source. If this is useful for the company, good news, if not, bad luck.

• Those companies which base their business model in open source.

• And a mix of the two aforementioned points.

Deepening in the second point, I could say that those companies were pretty interested specifically in the licensing process and the community around a product. In other words: perhaps the product is a great product, but they want a set of good people supporting it in terms of community. Thus this was a key factor.

So, after all, we created a preliminary definition of the main quality attributes addressed in the project (Robustness and Evolvability) based on the interviews:

As we can see, the community quality was addressed as being part of the quality models by some companies, what means that open source does not mean just free software (as in free beer) for companies, but also some other factors are being raised as important enough to be studied.

More information can be found at deliverable 1.2 from the QualOSS consortium.

QualOSS: Quality in Open Source Software

QualOSS is a FP6 project funded by the European Commission whose main goal was to go a step ahead in terms of the state of the art with respect to quality in open source software.

This project finished some months ago, but I’d like to keep in mind some interesting ideas that were developed there and that could be useful in a near future:

- Companies took part of the definition of the quality model: what provides other scope different from the academic one.
- There are four main quality aspects to be measured: product, processes, documentation and community.
- For each of them, and following a Goal-Question-Metric approach several metrics were raised to answer all of them.
- We had an industrial validation from a couple of projects that worked with us.

As lessons learned, I’d say that measuring quality is a hard task (wow, what a great conclusion! ¬¬). Even after the project I frankly think that we missed some good stuff, but we didn’t have enough time. We obtained interesting results, but my impression is that we could have done something a bit better, just a small step. However once you are in the diary work is totally opposite your perception and you are pretty busy everyday .

In any case, I’d like to personally thank all the partners that I’ve worked with for their time, patience and professionalism.

ps: after reading again the post, I think that this is more a personal thought about the project than the project itself. I promise to write something more technical in the following!.

Paper accepted at Metrikon 09!

As a result of the QualOSS project, a new paper has been accepted in the Metrikon 2009 congress. This kind of conferences are more industrial related, but this is a great opportunity to show another kind of community (different from academic ones) the kind of things that QualOSS do.

Authors: Martín Soto, Daniel Izquierdo-Cortazar, Marcus Ciolkowski

Title: Measuring the Performance of Open Source Development Communities: The QualOSS Approach

Abstract:
Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) has an increasing importance for the software industry. Similar to traditional (closed) software acquisition, F/OSS acquisition requires an assessment of whether its quality is sufficient for the intended purpose, and of whether the chances of being maintained and supported in the future, as well as of keeping certain quality standards over time, are sufficiently high. The first one of these aspects is strictly product related, and can be assessed using techniques that are not specific to F/OSS. The last two aspects, however, are related to the community developing the software, and require novel approaches to be evaluated properly. In this paper, we present an approach toward a comprehensive measurement
framework for F/OSS projects, developed in the EU project QualOSS. Although this approach takes into account product quality as well as process maturity and sustainability of the underlying F/OSS community, we concentrate here on its community-related aspects. After describing our quality model and assessment techniques in some detail, we close with a description of our ongoing evaluation effort and a discussion of lessons learned.